“Representational paintings are realistic, with content that can be easily talked about. Abstract art, by contrast, is less grounded in reality and more tricky to talk about. The results showed that verbalising their responses to the paintings appeared to distort the participants’ subsequent preferences.” Read more . . .

“For people who feel psychologically all at sea, the conservative values of authority, order and tradition provide a comforting anchor. That’s according to psychologists who further argue that a psychological threat, for example in the form of injustice or reminders of mortality, can even turn a liberal-minded person temporarily into a conservative – a response they call “defensive conservatism” Read more . . .

“A problem with interventions that use role-playing to beat prejudice is that bigots usually aren’t motivated to take the perspective of the groups that they discriminate against. In a new study, Gordon Hodson and colleagues have tested the effectiveness of an unusual alien-themed intervention for reducing homophobia that involves participants taking the perspective of a homosexual person, without really realising that that is what they’re doing.” Read more . . .

“In our society we take for granted that sex has only two categories: male and female. We learn in school that sex is caused or created by chromosomes, XX for females and XY for males. We assume that the typical path is that those sex categories create bodies with male or female characteristics. We teach in sociology classes that we then socially construct or build gender on top of the sex assignment based on those body characteristics. All of this is founded upon the premise that sex has just those two categories. We tend to ignore the facts about sex that suggest that sex itself is also a socially constructed category.” Read more . . .

“For now, I would like to post a draft of my contribution to the conference. Its argument is that the asymmetry between the attribution of intent for positive and negative side effects is the result of different baseline assumptions that we have for the states of mind that accompany good and bad outcomes.” Read more . . .

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One Response to “Situationism in the Blogosphere – August 2009”

[…] reading Salmon’s piece, I came across an article posted at the BPS Research Digest blog (Ht: The Situationist), about a new study by Ayumi Yamada suggesting that talking about art can alter our appreciation of […]